Tag: love poem

I value freedom most.
I wander
in both eyes and body
always collecting
but devoted to the last,
even fixated
but also loose with most
acquaintances stressing
compromise, meaning
yielding to my rule
and enjoying breaks,
enjoying screaming.

favoring
opportunity over floor,
I value the sky and
currents more than houses.
 the ephemeral in
our lives while also walking
three inches higher than I am,
on tiptoe,
touching things,
making threats in the air
when angered and
you say I am

 for-mi-da-ble,
           a bit virulent
is how you say it and
before we seek the advantageousness
of everything, it’s Friday
 and we are
 processing hard truths.
the way silence hits
mostly and my hand
opening, the spontaneity
of losing things.
tell me,
where do you keep
your pocketknife?

 life is rushing and swamps
with its shades of
blue; azure
  (you name things)
sky, or cobalt fluid
or nightmare
like a wall of nail polish
you’re reading every
dressed up inch of you.
your rehearsed malignance.
your wry contribution
with your cocked smile
to hide your jealous
sulk.

the moon moves
from womb
to waste
to task those
unsewn wounds
 and you embrace things now
with reticence
but you’re open to the epitaph
scrawled across the rock hard
eyelid
       temperance
that means patience, 
my Venus in Leo
is running.
you made him carve something else
across
your eyes that night
on Jupiter:
          I remember everything.

but you didn’t want to be
so right and you didn’t really
ask
 for things,      usually
you just opened a door
and walked in but
you made it clear
as you rummaged through
 the closet smelling him,
you are always someone’s
secret. you are
unconditional when furtive
but frigid and passing
like a northern mist
otherwise.

 

“venus in 12th house”

0

I read a note out loud to myself:
everything that is really hard
is going to save your life
and a blackbird landed on the branch
outside my living room
window.
still, their eyes small and
sharp
waiting to dive,
waiting for the buzz of cicadas
to start again.
that reminds me,

I say in my head,
i’m emaciating.
I take a sip of water.
starved from the looking
without touching and
I want too much
has many meanings.
I read the words aloud again
and pour myself a thimble
of almonds.

it is first that I craft the lie.
I begin to charm him:
untie a ribbon from her
rib cage and kneel,
bind his wrists together
and lick his inner thigh.
do you believe everything I say?
I stare intently when I
ask things.

and then you become the
braced masochist
and I become
the looming hit.

“maelstrom”

0

the boys I rescued
 and turned to saints;
their features outlined in
filthy thoughts    I

let them touch me with
rinsed fingertips,
watch them take great pleasure
in stroking the arches of my bare feet;
my callouses holding proof
of the miles I have walked
to hug the west.
better than my own docile traces
of lust pressed against them;
my own famished touch
as I dip into my cleft and whimper
because I can’t come big enough.
that sweaty heart of male violence,
male wants,
eroticized guns,
learn the art of being
enthroned in your
sex.
those biceped tongues,
those blue black nights where I fuck to get the
battle out so they don’t
 accidentally drown a garden
they were supposed to love.

 

other nights I do it hard,
grip the keys and shout sometimes;
let the room fill with copper, lick myself
from the chain,
taste my own
domination;
my submission to myself and
let you understand the dangers of
eroticized pain;
the art of being bled
for your sex.

 

smudged lip gloss
on their bare cheeks,
hosts
my undoing.
       teach me how to love like war
my persistent
bleating
inner child,
hands out and
crawling to you,
barely fed, swallowed by
red     lonesome and
under you,
next to you,
over you,
overdone,

 

but yet still a shadow
at your nightstand
waning in your rising
sun. 

 

“the martyr” (#7)

0


the first thing you notice about me is
the way I saunter
even to grab a ginger ale from the cooler
               “it’s my favorite.”
brush you, smile at your friends
and kind of swarm them
like an imposition
starting conversations about the
ludicrous state of things always alluding
to my prescience without
saying anything
you’ll say its the smirk I
 mastered not the crowd.

but then I retreat.
but then  I linger near the
exit the rest of the night with the crumpled straw
 in my hand
and the temper on my tongue
contained,
my earlier rage not expressed
or not handled as boldly
as it deserved to be;
the proclamations
the exits

I like way you held my hand
and said my name.
       my name is artemis.

sometimes buildings just catch on fire.
you say I always crouch with a
bow in hand.
            “I’m just nervous”
and that when I am lying I look away really
fast so you can’t see the sneer spread
and you know
I fucked your friends
and you know I’ll fuck some more
and you see me on the screen
 my name is Artemis.
parting lips, combing bangs,
practicing inflection as I said
I would.

you said you’ll always remember
the way I laughed LOUD
and so sudden
    touch his shoulder
like you were the funniest man in
the room.
and I’ll always remember
the way the door frame dripped
and bled to one sorrel-orange.
no, it’s not that you said yes.
you said “ok”
kind of folding,
tempering and allowing
which is the way I like
my men to lean.

I walked across the welcome mat
throwing matches as you swept,
the windows becoming a
 carrot color and me
disappearing.

“how guys save me in their phone  #4”

 

(13 odes to CKacyrek)

0

     “I have no future plans,”
I began calmly.

 I am arms outstretched
walking nowhere but with
ardency so
I am labeled,
whimsical and manic,
a troubled woman
not to marry and
like a wound up
fairy, the character that
keeps the music box

spinning.
until it’s boring:
the repetition,
the posing,
the pink smile and
matching slippers
leaping from her
gold coiled post
sprinkling glitter,
growing nerves and
ankles that bend flat
to walk to run to
crawl

 people like me because
 I have
 no plans,
am honest about it,
resplendent teeth when
writing sonnets to the men
and a sense of fury when
reflecting on affairs.
big,
have wings that carry weapons.    I
hear in a distance
   someone repeat it
I use intimidation as a tactic
to seize opportunity
well,
I am blessed with delusive
lips and
 I also use
 black magic.

“seven of cups”

0

what does all of this
mean to you?
she waves her hand
to no one. 

you say it’s important,
ask me to tell it in
“linear order”
but how can I get away with
things telling stories like
that? and besides,
I have survived time
and cage and aged
in linear order.
my proof
    (flex a ripped tricep)
is endless strength,
brimming veins
that have learned how to
vibrate, hum, cluck,
even whistle when your girl
walks by me       I’m
a snake

through her core
and now all you see is a doe
gored in your forest and
I got to eat the whole orchard
I asked for.
are you lost or
just quiet, just hiding
from the butcher inside
it?
 you know I’m dense,

ice cold, flush with
forked tongue ready to puncture
someone,     i’m lush;
maintaining a sense of
dam and containment
even in my most berating
fits of temper or panic,
I manage to remain
frozen these days
like a cracking lake
you say I am
sharp and

bitter.
but underneath my skin,
that blue-lace casing,
a carnise river:
little tributaries to
the turning of the world
in linear delivery.
and you say
full of rage     and I say
ok, just wait,

you and I are from
the same place
and I start to pace
the block once more. 

III.

0

 

sitting on the edge of the bay
 on a borrowed blanket,
I was vomiting up
 an Everclear Slurpee
and some sort of philosophy
about the closing of the day;
 the way it moved
death,
like an itinerant wave
that followed me
everywhere.
the tide crept back
and I heard you cough,
felt myself starting to drown again
and then your hand on my thigh
and then nothing at all. 

pain subsides in very
miniscule amounts
of time
if  you don’t
repeat the
 story. 

do not repeat the story

“how to be a river”

or

sit in it.

“how to be a lake”


and turning to you again, I
implore you to pick a title and
stick with it.   for me, I say:
do you like warnings or do you
like to drown?

I think at some point
you have earned the right to say
I know already because you lived it
without acquiescing to
authority so I asked
to see it first:
the river’s mouth,
even though they said
I’d never make it.

“warnings”

0

we are sharing visions.

during our forced intermission,
I became a lantern and
my own crucifixion was
paused to grow my
sparkling spine sharp like
sudden beams of light
shining
on your morning sex and
I walked forward slaughtering
everything hidden with a
 wave of my hand, focused
eyes    incantation, scribe
and text      I having been reborn with bone
 like wand, am luring rooks
for guns and ;
turning mice to men
with a flash of tongue
and then turning men to wolves
to find him.

the queen is fat now
gorging herself with army;
the war you begged for
and are bound to get
 is here on time.
I gather every friend I know
and share my plans
for combat
 enticing each one
 with a different reward.
this is the queen you
|asked for:
acerbic communist,
generous with her
violence, but you?
you will know me
by my sharp interjection,
sport–you?

you are
Persephone’s
final futile hours
picking berries in the
garden,
sniffing tulips absentmindedly,
        nevermind the bees or sunset
plucking lilies from the water,
watching the ripples form circles
around your fingertips
and then you’re
screaming at your flowers
being swallowed by the ground
  switch places
an earthworm bit her and said
as Pallas emerged with reminders,
a sello from the water,

floral crown and
speaking in her native tongue:
ways to blow direction,
ways to conjure storms.
oh, here it is again,
that little lie about choice
she goes with her knees
falling through the earth,

but she goes and keeps
her head above that dirt,
what’s a curse to those who
know the power
of reverse?
you.

 

“the magician (reversed)”

2

Express the value of life
in lines and
daubed charcoal.
Add the girl’s lids and tinted lashes,
fixed eyebrows,
nose,
lace collar under
overblown cloak.
Hair tucked beneath hood,
chin tucked to neck,
subtract her gloom;
then what would she do?
Harder to draw,
harder to draw something
in.
Highlight her cheekbones in rouge.
Add breath to an otherwise
achromatic lover.

Add her troubled partner in the backdrop:
blue-gray with a hint of black at the corners,
small silhouette of a rainstorm
receding over the edge of the horizon.
Add some balance to a ruminating giant.
Find and add
her absent brother.
Subtract her moans.
Erase her nose.
It’s too bull flare.
No one will take her like that.
Thin the clavicle.
Thin the waist.
Add some plum to the lips.
Add a remark.
“This will not do.”

Grab the Hi-Polymer.
Try to capture the gleam
of mistakes on her face:
birthmarks, pencil marks, oil sheen,
eraser flakes,
lines that are furrows or scars or
warrior wrinkles,
ruddy blotches on the thighs,
dry skin on the feet,
swan’s neck,
bucked teeth,
knife marks and a
revised smile.
Never trust a man with an
airbrush and a promise
the clouds whisper. 

She is flawless.
Precise.
Analogized you.
Contrast to your optimism;
your bubble of assurance
that is dominating,
that denies a compact or an inventory
and drawn in shady undertones
to hide complicated desires.
Proof of hidden bruise
shoved deep inside the confines
of gusto and canvass
come to life in the luster of pencil dust
and uncomplicated process,
 stretched wide
for the world to admire.
A deflated mirror.

She still has all her freckles
and you are noticing
a few things
about yourself.

 

“the artist”

 

 

0

your house was yellow.

my house was blue and
a ten by ten box;
a cage and me trapped,
torn between watching them
pack up their stuff
from their own pact to self
and me, dripping virulence,
pushing them out.
we needed a spark,
I pounced and

shortly after,
 the railing tumbled on my
sprinting ankles,
the basement rattled and the
floorboards dropped
filling the place with the kind of emptiness
that is so dense
 it smothers.
smoke smells a lot like
 ticking minutes
if we scented time the way we
spray each other.
I hear a bark.
hope the turtle remembers how to
duck and cover.
the cat’s sure got it.

remember me as a black-winged fury
hovering over your bed at night because
 there will be nothing left by dawn
except some burning blue
cedar wood and a cheap comb
that found its way buried in the dirt.
the photo albums gone,
dusty cookbooks charred,
vanished remote controls stay hidden
and the asbestos and fiberglass ceilings
imploded despite our fear that was the
thing that would kill us.
I am left with a cancer
that gnaws through the joints
like packs of rats chewing through cables
to take the attic back.
and I need this.

I really miss your hands on me
and the convivial cluster of caterpillars
that swallowed the bark
the day in the orchard
when you held me in sullen incubation
before the devastation of the forest,
before I made way for us,
the start,
the parting and somewhere
an empty crib stays unfurnished.
someone starts an engine.
the varnish is melting and so am I.
         God gave you a chance and
              an unfinished smile.
a smoke alarm malfunctions
mocking your reluctance
to just grin and bear it,
to just open up your arms
and catch me when I jump;

                but first here comes the fish tank

catch me with all the fit I threw.
we all look like burnt books
blowing in the breeze
 and now, I too,
am wafting with the exhumed memories.
before my legs even hit the dew,
you watch me dwindle to a million floating pieces
in the cradle of tar black trees.

 

you see the contract ascertained a certain
ephemeral appeal
and I’m too thirsty to complain
about anything but the heat.
hold your breath and wait
for some other current to take me.

                    baby

there are no exits.

 

“chrysalis”

1

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